Let’s talk royal firsts. First co-Queen: Mary II. First flushing royal loo: Installed by Prince Albert. First criminal conviction: Princess Anne in 2002 after her dog bit two children. First sovereign with the divine right to rule to own an iPod? Queen Elizabeth II.
So let me ask you this: First royal sex tape?
There can be only one person who might be the source of such a Buckingham Palace-foundation-rattling, marmalade-dropper of a shocker: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the man most likely to inspire the British public to bring back the pillory.
Ever since his great pal Jeffrey Epstein went off to discover just how excruciatingly hot the burning fires of the greatest depths of hell are in August 2019, one question has hovered, spectre-like: Was the pedophile secretly recording his famous pals having sex, including with the women he trafficked?
There are plenty of allegations and claims that point to exactly this.
The women abused by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have repeatedly said that Epstein had told them he was filming his guests.
In the 90s, when art school student Maria Farmer first arrived at Epstein’s seven storey mansion, she walked in and “The main thing he did … he showed me where the cameras, the men monitoring everything, were,” she told CBS News in 2019.
Accessed via a nearly “invisible door”, Epstein showed her what he said was the “media room”, inside which Farmer saw “all the cameras”, “monitors inside this cabinet” and “there were men sitting here”.
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“I looked on the cameras, and I saw toilet, toilet, bed, bed, toilet, bed … It was very obvious that they were, like, monitoring private moments.”
This alleged set up was not just in Epstein’s New York home – Farmer later told the Sun he had video equipment set up in “all of [his] residences … I know this because Epstein told me”.
“These rooms were enormous – bigger than houses. I have no idea why anyone needs so many computers in one room.
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“There were pinhole cameras to record everything on every estate. The cameras were ubiquitous. You couldn’t see them unless they were pointed out to you.”
At Epstein’s vast New Mexico ranch alone, Farmer said, there were three computer rooms “the size of houses” to spy on the famous.
The most obvious assumption about what Epstein was doing was collecting what your friendly local Russian FSB agent would call kompromat on the myriad powerful and connected sorts who flocked to enjoy his largesse.
In 2018, Epstein invited Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist James B. Stewart to his New York home for a 90-minute interview. After his death the following year, the Times reported that Epstein had told Stewart that “had dirt on powerful people”.
The financier, Stewart wrote in 2019, had told him he “knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people” about whom Epstein “claimed to know a great deal … some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use”.
In her posthumously released best-selling memoir, Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre wrote: “He’d always suggested to me that those videotapes he so meticulously collected in the bedrooms and bathrooms of his various houses gave him power over others.
“He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favours.”
The mystery deepens when we get to what the FBI found.
On July 6, 2019 the feds raided Epstein’s Manhattan house. To search the property’s 40 rooms took the team 12 hours.
In a fifth floor dressing room they discovered a safe, which they used a saw to open. Inside, as FBI Special Agent Kelly Maguire later revealed in court, they found CDs, jewellery, loose diamonds, a foreign passport with Epstein’s photo under another name, “large amounts of US currency” and hard drives.
Maguire didn’t have a warrant to take the safe’s contents, but when she returned with the right paperwork four days later, the items, including the CDs and hard drives, were no longer there. The court heard Maguire immediately contacted Epstein’s lawyer who, “20 to 30 minutes” later, turned up with the items in two suitcases and handed them over.
The hard drives and CDs have never been seen publicly since then.
Nor, as Maguire told the court during Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial in 2021, are they sure the contents on the CDs that were given to them by Epstein’s lawyer, was the same as what had been on the ones they had originally seen in the safe.
A not dissimilar scenario had played out nearly 15 years earlier when Palm Beach police detective Joe Recarey and his team searched Epstein’s Florida home in 2005.
Police found that “six computer hard drives in the house had been hastily removed, leaving dangling wires attached to monitors in several areas of the house”, according to journalist Julie K. Brown (whose investigation ultimately led to Epstein’s 2019 arrest) in her book Perversion of Justice.
“All the wires were still there, as if someone had pulled them just before we arrived,” Recarey is said to have written in his police report.
The prospect of there being sex tapes of King Charles’ brother made a splash in the headlines in January 2024. Epstein victim Sarah Ransome claimed, in emails unsealed by a US court, that Epstein had “sex tapes” including of Andrew, Bill Clinton and Sir Richard Branson. However, Ransome, soon after making the allegations, retracted them and the emails themselves were included in documents submitted by lawyers defending Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, to suggest Ransome’s unreliability.
The court was not given any proof of the existence of any tapes.
All three deny the allegations against them.
A Virgin Group spokesperson told the Guardian in 2024: “In a New Yorker report published in 2019, Ransome admitted that she had ‘invented’ the tapes. We can confirm that Sarah Ransome’s claims are baseless and unfounded.”
The Telegraph said of the Ransome emails that the “unsubstantiated … claims regarding the existence of sex tapes … will make yet more unpleasant reading at Buckingham Palace”.
After Epstein’s death the New York Times’ reported Farmer said that “one of my first thoughts … was that many prominent men and at least a few women must be breathing sighs of relief”.
In a 2003 interview, in tapes only released after his death, Epstein mused to a Wall Street Journal reporter about what he had learned in his finance career, saying that it was “not necessarily who you knew, but who you came in contact with.”
And the people that he came into contact with, based on flight logs and other irrefutable evidence, included high end celebrities.
Another thing we definitely know: Andrew stayed at Epstein’s places in New York and on his private Caribbean island Little St James. Historian Andrew Lonwie, in Entitled, his recent book on the disgraced former prince, alleges that he also spent three days at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch.
It was Ancient Greek mathematician Euclid who said that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
It does not take much imagination to consider the possibility that out there in some remote FBI evidence locker or in a block of concrete dumped in the Mariana Trench, video recordings exist of the host of wealthy, powerful sorts of guests Epstein invited to holiday with him.
Let’s just stress here, Andrew has always strenuously denied Ms Giuffre’s allegations that he sexually assaulted her on three occasions, and has never been charged with any crime.
What the events of the last six weeks or so have shown is that new material about Andrew’s ties to Epstein keeps coming out, that the drip, drip, drip of emails and fresh details that have ultimately resulted in Mr Mountbatten-Windsor being de-princed and about to be exiled to some grey bit of Norfolk.
Does anyone really think we have reached the end, that there are no more shoes to drop or embarrassing revelations to hit the headlines? Not least given that the US Congress’ house oversight committee is on the case?
Last week Democrats on the committee called for Andrew to testify before Congress and this week the top Democrat on the committee, Jamie Raskin, accused Donald Trump’s Department of Justice of a “shameful and gigantic cover-up” into the shuttered investigation into possible Epstein co-conspirators.
In 2011, Andrew emailed Epstein and said, “we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
And that’s exactly what the Palace should be scared about.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.news.com.au ’
